I know many of you know about our kitchen renovation, but I've never really talked about our bathroom and emotional disaster that happened shortly after that.
When we did
our kitchen in 2010, while it was exciting that we were renovating, it was really stressful. To be honest, like a lot of people, we were at a place where we just weren't ready for any big financial hits, and certainly not an impromptu kitchen renovation. Even though insurance covered a big chunk of it, it still wasn't everything and the difference we had to make up kind of tapped us out for the year and it was only October; We already knew it was not going to be a great Christmas, but we were prepared. Boy were we wrong.
Then came December.
Our youngest was 3 and at the time wasn't very good at making it to the bathroom all of the time. This instance she happened to almost make it, but not quite and there was pee all over the bathroom floor. Grabbing towels I started wiping when I noticed a tile seemed a bit squishy. Hm, that's weird.
That's when I realized I could pick up one corner with my fingernail and underneath it was a bit wet, and then the next tile and then the next. Suddenly, I was here:
...and underneath the other layers of tiles the floor was completely soft, wet and smelly. You can even see the staining. The toilet must have been leaking very slowly for a long time, and because there were 4 layers of previous flooring, we never saw any of it until it became completely horrendous. This was a month and a half after our huge kitchen reno and a few weeks before the holidays. To say the we both lost it was an understatement. We had a rotten floor, Christmas was coming and we had been completely drained from the other renovation. It will probably go down in our history books as the worst winter ever, not only financially, but emotionally. It really affected us. After that for months every time we heard a weird noise in the house we were paranoid it was something huge going wrong, and then it piled on top of other things and just kept getting worse. When you keep taking big hits like that, it changes you. Worry is a terrible burden and the stress just shakes you. It's one of those things that someday when Hubby and I are this old, crusty couple in our adult diapers we will look back and remember the year the house almost broke us, literally, and hopefully laugh.
So we did the best we could and what we could manage. We fixed just the floor. That was it,
we corrected the immediate problem and were done. At the time, we couldn't manage any more.
There is tile on every wall 4 feet high. It's a small bathroom, and the grout is stained a really odd shade of yellow and never seemed clean.Well, of course when everything came out to do the floor, there was no tile at all behind the vanity and all of the tile had cracked and broke around it on removal. If you can see just behind the top, there is missing tile. I thought I would buy something similar and just patch it and looked for something for months, except, it is some weird shade of white that matches NOTHING. Then I thought I would match the grey. Again. Nothing. I was going to try to do a mosaic, but even that was hard to find something that "might go". So we sat on it. And every time I saw that missing tile I cringed.
So finally, a year and some change later, we are having the tile ripped out up to the shower edge and the walls made shiny and new! He is starting today and by next week (fingers crossed ), my bathroom will actually be done! I can actually screw the vanity top to the base, and not look at the messed up drywall behind the sink and silently fume! It am so excited!
And very reflective....
I guess I wanted to tell you the entire story, because everyone's lives seem so perfect on the surface; when I look back through the posts while everything was going on, everything seems so peachy keen, when to be honest, it was a time in our lives when everything felt broken.
Those times are so hard to get through. And I felt like I was the only one. And I was drowning, on a high tension wire....
I think with this economy, a lot of people feel like that now. It's such a hard time.Things are getting more expensive, some people are really struggling financially. Talking to many of the ladies this weekend, I realized how many people there are that can barely hold onto their jobs and their homes.
While these times really stink, I am so glad none of us are alone. We are all in the same boat together. And we have to remember it is not hopeless. Even in those dark days that are so long and seem endlessly hard while you are going through them, they will end in light. It's all about time, and patience.
I am also so glad I have the faith I have now. I think if we had had it that Winter, we would have seen things so differently. We would have had The Father to lean on instead of our own worries and thoughts, just churning and letting it feed itself into a sickening frenzy.
"Fear not, for I am with you;be not dismayed, for I am your God, I will strengthen you, yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand."
Isaiah 41:10
Yeah. I coulda used that.
Jen
